Retraction Watch

When it takes two university-federal agency letters – and five years – for a journal to retract a paper

In June of 2020, officials from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center of San Francisco and the University of California, San Francisco, sent a letter to the journal Oncogene with the findings of an investigation of scientific misconduct: A paper the journal had published in 2007 contained “falsified data,” and the officials recommended the journal “assess this paper for retraction.”

The 2020 letter – which we obtained through a public records request – was the second time the institutions had alerted the journal. As the officials stated, a previous investigation had found issues in the 2007 paper, and UCSF-VA had communicated “earlier evidence that this same paper had data fabrication and/or falsification constituting research misconduct” to the journal in 2017.

“Even though the journal has been notified after the last investigation and not taken action,” the 2020 letter stated, “they should be notified again because additional research misconduct has been found.”

In fact, a journal staffer was in the midst of discussing the issues in the article with Rajivir Dahiya, the corresponding author and then director of UCSF’s Urology Research Center with an appointment at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

Gov’t committee in Pakistan lets plagiarizing vice-chancellor off the hook

A government expert committee in Pakistan last year cleared a university vice-chancellor of plagiarism charges based on inconsistent claims of ignorance, Retraction Watch has learned.

The committee, which was convened by the Higher Education Commission (HEC), also appears to have flouted rules that would have held the vice-chancellor responsible even if he had no knowledge of any plagiarism committed by work under his supervision. HEC funds and oversees higher education in Pakistan.

“This sends the wrong message to the academic community and undermines the credibility of the HEC,” Farukh Iqbal, who brought the charges, told Retraction Watch.

The case seemed simple enough at first. But it has since spiraled into a saga that may reveal as much about the value of political muscle in Pakistan as it does about academic dishonesty.

Here’s one article that won’t be making any top 50 papers list

Who doesn’t love a list? The 500 best rock songs of all time. The 100 tallest buildings on the planet. The 10 smartest dog breeds. The 14 silliest place-names on earth (with Middelfart, Denmark in the six-spot, you can only imagine the places you’ll go.)

In October, the Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation tried – and failed – to publish its own ranking of important papers in the field. The article, “The Top 50 Articles on Knee Posterolateral Corner Injuries,” by a group at Tulane University in New Orleans, purported to give readers a run-down of the 50 most-cited papers on posterolateral corner injuries between 1976 and 2021.

If you’re afraid of numbers, you might want to skip ahead. If not: Within the top 50 was a Top 10 list, capped by this 2009 review article, which, according to the authors, had garnered 205 citations – and amassed a citation density of 15.77 (citations divided by years in print) – since publication.

Citation density, meet the dust. According to the retraction notice:

After a sleuth reveals a paper with authorships advertised for sale, it’s retracted

Last August 12th, Nick Wise came across a Facebook post advertising the first, third, and fifth author positions for sale on a scientific paper with the same title as a recently published article.

Wise, a scientific sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions, posted a comment on PubPeer with a screenshot of the advertisement and contacted the publisher of the journal.

Six months later, the article, “Potential application of AlP nanosheet semiconductor in the detection of toxic phosgene, thiophosgene, and formaldehyde gases,” has been retracted. It had appeared in Semiconductor Science and Technology, an IOP Publishing title, and has been cited once.

Meanwhile, the authorship broker says he has left the business.

Weekend reads: ‘Is economics self-correcting?’; ’20 years of ‘terror’ in the laboratory’; a look at self-citations

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 39,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Wiley paused Hindawi special issues amid quality problems, lost $9 million in revenue

Hindawi, the open access publisher that Wiley acquired in 2021, temporarily suspended publishing special issues because of “compromised articles,” according to a press release announcing the company’s third quarter financial results.

Brian Napack, Wiley’s president and CEO, specifically noted the “unplanned publishing pause at Hindawi” as a factor that “challenged” the company this year.

The pause began in mid-October and ended in mid-January, a Wiley spokesperson told us.

In Wiley’s third quarter that ended Jan. 31, 2023, the suspension cost Hindawi – whose business model is based on charging authors to publish – $9 million in lost revenue compared to the third quarter of 2022. The company cited the pause as the primary reason its revenue from its research segment “was down 4% as reported, or down 2% at constant currency and excluding acquisitions,” the press release stated.

Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee

In March 2020, a group of biologists published a paper on the website of an open access journal.

Nearly three years later, the publisher, Wiley, withdrew the article because, according to the withdrawal notice, the authors were “unable to finalize” payment of the fee to publish the version of record, known as the Article Publication Charge or APC.

The manuscript, “Eco-evolutionary factors that influence its demographic oscillations in Prochilodus costatus (Actinopterygii: Characiformes) populations evidenced through a genetic spatial–temporal evaluation,” had appeared on the site of the journal Evolutionary Applications “as an Accepted Article,” according to the notice, but the full text is no longer available online. It had not been indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science before being withdrawn on February 27.

The notice stated that the article

Ob-gyn loses PhD after committee finds he made up research

It was déjà vu last month when a university in Belgium stripped Egyptian physician Hatem Abu Hashim of his doctorate after he was found to have fabricated data in his thesis.

Just weeks earlier, another Egyptian doctor, Ahmed Badawy, lost the PhD degree he had earned at a Dutch university in 2008. Abu Hashim and Badawy are both professors in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Mansoura University in Egypt.

According to an investigation by the Vrije Universeit Brussel (VUB), which awarded Abu Hashim his PhD in 2013, the researcher was in “serious violation of scientific integrity” based on “overwhelming evidence of fabrication of statistical outcomes” and “clear lack of statistical proficiency.”

Journals dismiss claims that Harvard researcher’s work on race is ‘pseudoscience’

Two journals have dismissed allegations of research misconduct leveled against a political scientist at Harvard in an anonymous memo that labeled his work “pseudoscience.”

The 2018 memo signed by “Social Scientists for Research Integrity” – which does not have an internet presence that we could find – makes claims of academic misconduct against Ryan Enos, who denies any wrongdoing. The journals that published two of Enos’ papers singled out in the memo decided to let the articles stand after investigating the charges. A committee at Harvard University, where Enos is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies, also reviewed the claims and dismissed them.

The allegations primarily concerned purported manipulation of data in Enos’ 2015 article, “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). The paper has been cited 120 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Weekend reads: A whistleblower speaks; an ecologist’s suspension is questioned; ‘massive plagiarism’ allegations

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are nearly 39,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

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